Sunday, June 26, 2011

Letter to Michele Bachmann Concerning the Fed

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

June 26, 2011

Michele Bachmann

103 Cannon HOB

Washington, DC 20515

Dear Ms. Bachmann:

Please take a position concerning the Federal Reserve Bank and the legal tender law.

I recently gave a small contribution to your campaign and to Ron Paul's and Gary Johnson's. I am not certain that I will vote for a Republican in November 2012, though. One reason I contributed to you is the legacy media's bias against you.

In order for me to continue to support your candidacy I will need to know where you stand on the Federal Reserve Bank. You need to be specific. Stephen Moore's recent Wall Street Journal article* about you was unconvincing. Moore indicates that you would appoint a different Fed chairman than Bernanke, not that you would eliminate the post altogether. I appreciate your opposition to TARP. But the headline referred to Ludwig von Mises while the authors whom you admire include Art Laffer and Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman's monetarism and Art Laffer's supply-side economics depend on big government. Perhaps you might base your position on Hayek's essay "Denationalisation of Money."

I await your position on the Fed, which is the decisive one concerning big government, for the Fed is a necessary and sufficient condition for big government.

7 comments:

I wouldn't give Ron Paul or Michele Bachmann even my two cents! Michele has had several opportunities to stand up for the Constitution on the issue of Barack's NON-eligibility. Instead, she chose to cave to the lame-stream media, and REFUSED to take the ONLY stance possible if one adheres to their Oath of Office. Ron Paul likewise, has FAILED to DEMAND BO be removed for his ineligibility. These people MUST be held to a higher standard. They have refused at every opportunity to do their duty.The next POTUS must NOT come from anyone now serving. PERIOD! Allen West is a disgrace! IMHO, ALL members of the 111th and 112th Congresses are guilty. My prayer is that EVERY SINGLE ONE of them will be hanged, once tried, as a signal to others that America is FINISHED with assaults on our Constitution, ESPECIALLY from those entrusted to be our servants!

The media would use that position to attack them. The most important issues now are the Federal Reserve Bank and property rights. Both are serious immediate threats that the media does not acknowledge. The birth certificate issue should be subsidiary to the substantive issues.

I think it's about time SOMEONE started getting hammered by the LSM for standing up for EVERY part of the Constitution!Mitchell, you KNOW you are my hero when it comes to the eligibility issue. I see the Constitution as an "All or Nothing" proposition. Oath takers may NOT "pick and choose" which parts they mean to defend. If any one of our elected representatives were attacked by the press for demanding BO's removal, I can almost guarantee that person would win the 2012 election for POTUS! To defend eligibility and take it on in public shows a TRUE commitment to the Constitution. I think MANY Americans would be all over that campaign! Who cares about attacks from the LSM?You are correct, there are MANY other pressing issues, but how can We the People trust anyone who refuses to defend the Constitution in it's entirety? ESPECIALLY after taking an oath to do so.....?

Dear Anonymous: Economics was part of moral philosophy until relatively recently. One of the first people to talk about economics was Aristotle. He discussed it in his Politics. Adam Smith was primarily a moral philosopher who rejected Christianity in favor of Stoicism. Stoicism involves a benevolent deity. The phrase "invisible hand" that appears directly in the middle of both Smith's book on economics, "Wealth of Nations" and his book on ethics "Theory of Moral Sentiments" references a benevolent Stoic deity.

Smith was only the second generation of faculty at Edinburgh to write in English. Prior to that all writing was in Latin. So the break from Scholasticism and the ideas of Aquinas had been recent.

In fact, many of the ideas on economics had already appeared in the Christian writings of Aquinas and his followers. Nicholas Oresme in the 14th century (I think) was one of the first writers to discuss the immorality of inflation, i.e., of today's Keynesian economics, which goes back to ancient times.

David Hume, also in his moral philosophy, talked about the ridiculousness of what is now called Keynesian economics.

Economics has never been a science in the sense of physics. In the medieval meaning of science as theoretical knowledge (based on Aristotle) economics is a science, but the claim that it can make accurate predictions about the future is not true.

Economics can make very broad predicitons about the future that involve multi-decade long time horizons. The confidence limit of something happening at a given point in time is barely broader than a prediction based on a philosophical construct like "character." "Character is fate" according to philosophers, and "printing money causes inflation" according to Ron Paul. The two have similar confidence intervals.

As a result, all sorts of quackery have come to dominate economics as it is taught in universities, especially in the field called "macro-economics." Macro-economics is immoral and is not science in any meaning. It is superstition.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.